Jim Newton, a public policy lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles, isn’t convinced people will see their lives as better served by three different governors, three different legislatures or three different Departments of Education. “I don’t think it’s substantively sensible,” he said, calling Draper’s initiative “politically doomed.”

“If we have learned anything,” UCLA psychologist Martie Haselton writes in her book “Hormonal: The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones — How They Drive Desire, Shape Relationships, Influence Our Choices and Make Us Wiser,” it is that “although biology plays a role, our social context (and our agency to reflect and make choices) matters just as much.”

Peter Whybrow, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who runs the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, underlines the problem: Electronic “devices tie into a section of the brain that is ancient and reward-driven,” he told me. The brain “is based on very simple principles. If something works for you, you want to do it again.” And there is no doubt that social media — with its constant stream of “likes” — is rewarding the teen brain.

Maj. Tyrone Vargas is one of four UCLA ROTC officers who risked their lives to save a man trapped in his car underneath a big rig that crashed on the 405 freeway…. “It’s strange to hear I’m a hero. The first thing that comes to mind is, that’s what we’re here for,” Vargas said. (Translated from Spanish)

A group of researchers led by UCLA may have found a vaccine against three potent pathogens that could be used if a group or country launches a bio-terror attack…. The UCLA team used molecular engineering to develop the new vaccines by using a common delivery method to bolster immunity.

A professor from UCLA has designed “an antidote that could help people enjoy wine or cocktails or beer without a hangover.” According to Yunfeng Lu, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in the Los Angeles university, there is now a solution to that all-powerful, all-consuming hangover, and it has been tested (successfully) in mice. In tests, Lu and fellow professor Cheng Ji, an expert in liver diseases from Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and Lu’s graduate student Duo Xu, found that the treatment decreased the blood alcohol level in inebriated mice by 45 percent in four hours.